Haunted Newsreel

Over at the Classic Horror Film Boards (no relation to Classic-Horror.com), Tom Weaver reported that Ben Chapman, the actor who performed as the Creature in the on-land sequences of Creature from the Black Lagoon, died this morning (February 21st) of undisclosed causes. He was 82.

Ben's death has particular meaning here at Classic-Horror, because he was one of the first interviews we ran, all the way back in 2002. You can read it here.(read more...)

Over at DVD Panache, an awesome movie blog, Adam Ross posts a weekly segment called the Friday Screen Test, where a blogger or "web-siteur" answers questions about their film fanatacism. This week, I'm the one answering the questions. A lot of the questions seemed simple until I started answering them, at which point they became downright complex.(read more...)

Roy Scheider, the actor who famously exclaimed "We're gonna need a bigger boat" in Jaws (1975), died Sunday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital. He was 75 years old. The cause of death has not been disclosed, but Scheider had been undergoing treatment for multiple myleoma for the past two years at the University's Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. Scheider made his feature debut in a horror film, Del Tenney's 1962 vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave romp The Curse of the Living Corpse. Between Oscar nods for his turns in 1971's The French Connection and 1979's All That Jazz, he appeared in Steven Spielberg's blockbuster shark flick Jaws (1975) and its immediate sequel, Jeannot Szwarc's Jaws 2 (1978). In 1991, Scheider played the mysterious Dr. Benway in David Cronenberg's 1993 adaptation of William Burrough's Naked Lunch.(read more...)

Variety.com reports that Robert Englund's horror project The Vij (previously reported as The Viy) is set to go with Englund in the director's chair and Christopher Lee in a lead role. The film is based on Nikolaj Gogol's novel, which follows a young priest who is manipulated by an evil genie into committing murder and falling in love with a witch who is not who she appears to be. The book was previously adapted as 1968's Viy and it also served as an inspiration for Mario Bava while he developed Black Sunday (1960).(read more...)